Microsoft Reader

Somehow, I don't think anything that involves a computer will ever give you the feeling of reading a real book. Few things in life can satisfy as much as curling up with a good book. I somehow just can't fathom the same enjoyment cozying up to my monitor.

Sorry. I realize my comment doesn't help you with your question. But I get the feeling sometimes when browsing this board that some people could do with a bit more reading of good books. I hope someone else can give you some more useful advice.

Well I want the feeling of reading my books while at the same time, revising them. It has wonderful highlight, add note, and draw features which I find useful. I know MS Word 2003 has those things as well, but I want to read through it as if it were a book.

Shameless Designs - wait till you have a couple of sheets of e-paper where the story on the page changes whe it "feels" you turn the page...

Mas0n... I didn't mean to dismiss or disparage your use of ebooks. On the contrary, I truly hope someone can help you. Your ideas sound quite interesting and not impractical. And I applaud you simply for reading, and I infer from your other comments, writing. Not enough attention is given to either pursuit today in my opinion. Anything that would aid in promoting literacy has my full support.

Sput... Aesthetic considerations aside, my eyes have suffered too much from far too many years of staring into a CRT to ever find an ebook preferable to cozying up with an actual book under a strong soft-white reader light.

#4 - but e-paper isn't the same as a current e-book...it looks and feels just like (well almost) real paper. It's white and relies on reflected light with black looking ink. It folds, bends and turns just like paper...for all intents and purposes you'll be holding a book that has just one sheet of paper.

Best yet, it's thought that products might be able to be water proof so reading in the bath won't run the risk of having the book splashed and the ink run..

Actually, better yet is that the little pictures could be animated...or your newspaper could update with the latest breaking headlines even as you read the sports pages.

I like to wind up the librarians at work by pointing these "nearly finished" technologies out...imaging a library with no books

Dude, I work in a library. Putting books away. That technology cant some soon enough! (the wink icon is busted)
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first off i can't help you, mason. you need to have a program written to work on windows modile or palm OS and i don't believe programs like stardock would be compatable. even if they were it would take a lot of unneccesary space. i know a great interactive developer who is writing flash programs for pocket pc's but even flash wouldn't work with your Reader app. it could be something you suggest to Microsoft or Palm.

As for books/vs digital books..well i can go both ways on this. in type design we learn to appreciate printed books and the art that goes(went) into making a good book. i grew up reading a lot of books and i know nothing could ever replace the feel of one. but damn. i love the conveinience of digital files and have been dragging all kinds of stuff into my palm pilot. for example, a whole newspaper. i save trees things like the Acrobat Reader (which microsoft's is a cousin) give you that option to read books and i would absolutely buy a book in digital format so i can read it - on the crapper, on the subway, or in a boring meeting smaller, more portable. you just have to scroll more but by now i'm so used to scrolling i dont even think about it.

and..and..and.. you save trees!!!

e-paper is another cool technology developed over at the Xerox Park. It consists of tiny beads with one side painted black and the other painted white. Each beads receive instructions as to flip on the black or white side, and therefore forming characters, drawings, etc.
For the moment, the technology works perfectly, but the cost of each sheet of paper is quite prohibitive.  Last I read, Xerox were now trying to push that technology to try to get infinite colors... Quite cool. Something for the future, I'm sure.

Is Microsoft Reader even skinnable? It would be awesome to to have all sorts of different looking pages and stuff (like with burned edges resembling an ageless book, or (as I've noticed a lot of people taking a liking to) metallic pages(?)

again, 'not bloody likely' . besides, images only add document size. an entire novel is still very small in terms of plain text, images not only give strain on the eyes while reading a lot of text but take up much needed realestate.

I use MS-Reader on Desktop PC and Pocket PC, I also have a plugin for MS-Word to convert documents into e-books, (which needs time ti layout correctly), but I cannot remember where I got this plugin from.

MS-Reader is skinable, can also set a Per-App skin if you wish

That would be awesome! I want it to be just like it is, only have two pages visable side by side, instead of one that you have to scroll down with. I'm not entirely sure if that's possible, but that would be awesome. Also, it would be cool if I could click on either page instead of having to go all the way down to the bottom of the screen and hit the tiny little arrows. So it would look like this
[pg1 | pg2] and if you clicked on pg2 it would bring you to
[pg3 | pg4]
Anyway I would totally appreciate any help!

MS-Reader only displays one page at a time, there no electronic book that I know of that will display more, and I believe that MS-Reader is the only one (I've not seen any others).

BTW: The plugin for word is made by MS, and can be downloaded from there MS-Reader website, Google search for "MSReader" and you will find it

Here >> http://www.microsoft.com/reader/




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BTW: The plugin is not what you seem to think it is, the plugin allows you to created e-books from your documents (in a format for MS-Reader), sorry to get your hopes up

It may not be exactly what you want but another plugin is "Click-Book" which allows you to print out Word documents in an A5 booklet. No harm in looking and trying




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#14 by Sir Stumpy - 2/24/2004 4:58:01 AM MS-Reader only displays one page at a time, there no electronic book that I know of that will display more, and I believe that MS-Reader is the only one (I've not seen any others).

Adobe Reader can display two pages side by side. format is PDF (of course). better reader application, better format. so stay away from that Microsoft stuff )

We were talking E-Books, not PDF files.

PDFs are e-Books. it´s just a different format. an other format is the one Palm Reader uses.
just as both JPEG and GIF are digital images.

Ok

Is there away to change MS Word docs into PDF? That would definately be convenient!

Mas0n - yes. There are various tools that can do this, though if someone can point me to a free one, I'm still looking! The things I've looked at tend to act as printer drivers. One required a poscript file (again generated by setting up a printer driver).
http://www.software-partners.co.uk/index.php?sitesig=SP&page=01_printing&subpage=013_downloads

There are tools to take Office docs directly though I understand...but I don't have a link to hand

You could always go down the Adobe route - it's not cheap though http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html
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microaoft has their own pdf ability/format through Office. you can create directly from word, excel, or whatever. still, cost$

#22 - Do you have a link to info about this? The license we have at work for MS products may well include us being able to do this and I've got a number of people who have asked about being able to do this.

We experimented with setting up Distiller on a Mac based web server at one point using a box and Distiller watching that folder to kick off the PDF creation...it worked and let us offer PDF creation for everyone for a while until we noticed that the license for Distiller didn't allow this!

I think there is a save as pdf or export as pdf. at least I think there is in office xp

and peple who read r smrt

sput, office XP SP1 i think. www.microsoft.com/office . should find all the info there. i just noticed it one day when they ped office on my computer.. suddenly, pdf toolbar and options. i still use Acrobat - but for just office stuff the microsoft utility should be a nice bonus.